Science and Technology

Last year, Google’s DeepMind A.I. development house released a “tool” called DeepDream that let neural networks loose on innocent imagery, with truly terrifying results. Though it was hailed as a window into the secret experiences of A.I, in reality, DeepDream was a demonstration of just how primitive the mind of modern A.I. really is. But could even an artificial intelligence be alien enough to pervert the peaceful, soothing imagery of the great Bob Ross?

A new video titled “Deeply Artificial Trees,” which applies DeepDream to every frame of a Bob Ross video, proves that the answer to this question is, well, yes. Good grief, yes. Further, it even applies the technique to the audio — making the experience truly nightmarish.

DeepDream’s algorithms basically work by following the simplest mathematical route from basic shapes in an image to a guess at the objects those shapes represent. It then morphs the image slightly, then tries again. Over time this means that the images actually become what they’re perceived to be by the A.I. in a sort of self-reinforcing downward spiral toward freakish pictures from the world’s worst acid trip. Take a look at the video (if you dare), and check out our explanation below.

Deeply Artificial Trees was designed to highlight “the unreasonable effectiveness and strange inner workings of deep learning systems. The unique characteristics of the human voice [are] learned and generated as well as hallucinations of a system trying to find images which are not there.”

Researchers think DeepDreams system of “guess at image, reinforce that guess, then guess again” is roughly similar to the first steps in human visual perception in the brain. But the A.I. version gets off track because a neural network doesn’t receive any direction or input from a higher-level organizer like the human brain. Without some evolved wisdom to go with the raw intellect of the computer, every roundish shape could, over many iterations, get categorized as an eye, even if it’s nowhere near where eyes should logically go in the real world. The network produces animal and other specific types of imagery because that’s what was in the pictures Google used to train it — like a human being, it can only draw from what it knows (and apparently, it’s seen a lot of dogs and cars).

Without enough information about the context of a scene, algorithms can slowly turn details like clouds into creepy mutants on unicycles. Funnily enough, that sort of chaotic pattern-matching is also thought to be part of the cause of human hallucinations on certain drugs. These substances are believed to, among other things, moderately decouple the brain’s sensory regions from its logical faculties. In some ways, a person tripping balls on acid is actually seeing a more baseline, raw level of image perception than the logically corrected version of reality they would see while sober.

That being said, we really don’t recommend getting high before trying out DeepDream.

Graham Templeton is a freelance science and tech writer in Vancouver, Canada covering the interface between culture and bleeding edge research. His work has also been featured in MIT Technology Review, Motherboard, ExtremeTech, and elsewhere.

In a moment of traffic frustration back in December, Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk tweeted, “Traffic is driving me nuts. Am going to build a tunnel boring machine and just start digging… I am actually going to do this.”And with that tweet, The Boring Company was started.

According to their website, The Boring Company intends to “solve the problem of soul-destroying traffic” by creating “a large network of road tunnels many levels deep.” The tunnels would also likely be compatible with another one of Elon Musk’s concepts — the Hyperloop. To access the underground system, a car on ground-level would drive onto an electric sled which would then be lowered into the tunnel system. The electric sled would allow for speeds up to 125 mph, have zero-emissions, increase safety, and allow for a reduced tunnel diameter making construction quicker and cheaper.

Construction of the first tunnel began earlier this month in California.

We all want our top investigative bodies to be headed by competent officials. We also all want to ensure that these officials can freely investigate other branches of the government — including the presidential administration — without fear of retribution. How can we tell whether Donald Trump’s firing of FBI Director James Comey was meant to ensure competent leadership of the FBI, as Trump claims, or to prevent Comey from digging deeper into Trump’s potential connections with Russia, as many Democrats claim.

Our personal political perspectives will strongly influence us to favor one explanation or the other, regardless of the truth. According to behavioral science research, our minds tend to interpret new information in accordance with our past beliefs — a thinking error known as the confirmation bias. Fortunately, we can fight the confirmation bias in such situations by evaluating the opinions of people who both have the most information and have political motivations to support one side, but fail to do so or even support the other side.

In this case, we can observe a number of prominent Republicans expressing concerns over Comey’s firing. Senate Intelligence Chairman Richard Burr, a North Carolina Republican who heads the Senate’s Russia investigation, stated that he was “troubled by the timing and reasoning” of Comey’s firing, which “confuses an already difficult investigation for the Committee.” So did a number of other influential Republican Senators, such as Bob Corker, who chairs the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and stated in response to Trump firing Comey that "It is essential that ongoing investigations are fulsome and free of political interference until their completion.” Representative Justin Amash, who belongs to the conservative House Freedom Caucus, even stated that he intends to introduce legislation calling for creating an independent commission to investigate Russia's interference in the election. Pat Tiberi, a conservative member of the House, expressed potential support for a special prosecutor of the Trump and Russia connection and stated that “the White House needs to come clean.”

Altogether, about 40 Republican members of Congress have expressed concerns over Comey’s firing, while virtually every Democrat is calling for an independent commission or special prosecutor to evaluate Comey’s firing. While some of these Republicans are known for breaking ranks at times, such as Senator John McCain, many others — such as Corker and Burr — are mainstream Republicans who generally toe the party line. This data on many of those in the know — federal lawmakers — who have clear political motivation to align with Trump firing Comey instead broke ranks provides strong evidence that the decision to fire Comey is less about incompetence and more about the Russia investigation than anything else.

Another thinking error playing a role in clouding our judgment is illusory correlation, namely an incorrect — illusory — perception of a connection between two events. Trump’s administration claimed, in a memo by deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein that Trump referenced in his firing of Comey, that Comey lost support due to his handling of the investigation into Hillary Clinton’s email server. Democrats claimed that Trump fired Comey because of Comey’s investigation into the Trump-Russia connection as part of Russia’s meddling in the US presidential elections.

One of these is an illusory connection, but which is it? Due to confirmation bias, Republicans will be likely to see the Trump-Russia connection as illusory. Democrats will tend to see the Clinton investigation connection as illusory.

Fortunately, we can use another technique from behavioral science to correct for this thinking error — consider the alternative. Consider a situation where Trump’s true concerns lay with Comey’s Clinton email server investigation. When would Trump fire Comey if this was the case? Trump would fire Comey when Trump entered office, as Trump did with a number of federal attorneys. Instead, Trump specifically made a decision to keep Comey in office when he took the presidency, despite knowing about Comey’s handling of the email server. Trump specifically indicated, in a message loud and clear for the government investigative bodies, that he would not pursue any further investigation into Clinton’s email server shortly after he was elected. As late as April 12, long after Trump had access to any secret information about Comey’s handling of Clinton’s email server and any other information relevant to Comey’s pre-election activities, Trump said in an interview with Fox Business Network “I have confidence in [Comey]." Given this evidence, it seems quite unlikely that the real reason for Comey’s firing is the Clinton email scandal.

What about the Trump-Russia investigation? According to Fox News, a conservative source, the day before he was fired, Comey met with the Republican and Democrat Senators on the Senate intelligence committee, Senators Richard Burr and Mark Warner. At the meeting, he discussed the inquiry into Russian hacking in the presidential election and potential involvement of Trump and members of his administration in this hacking. Burr and Warner both wanted Comey to speed up the investigation, and Comey responded that he needed more resources to conduct the investigation. Earlier, Comey allegedly made a request for more resources for this investigation from Rosenstein, whose later memo was used by Trump as a reason to fire Comey. Given the evidence of the closeness of the timing of Comey’s requests for more resources and Trump firing Comey, the connection between the investigation into Russian hacking and the firing of Comey appears to be true rather than illusory.

Now, this behavioral science-based conclusion does not favor the conservative perspective, and instead favors the liberal one. Will it mean that conservatives dismiss it out of hand? To determine if this is the case, I went on the conservative radio network 700WLW to speak on this topic with the well-known radio show host Scott Sloan two days after Comey’s dismissal. Sloan is known as a strong proponent of Christian and conservative values but not someone who practices post-truth politics by dismissing the truth in favor of his personal beliefs. We had a civil discussion, during which Sloan acknowledged the validity of this behavioral science-informed perspective and accepted that the evidence pointed against Trump’s narrative. It is highly likely that our conversation swayed some of his conservative audience to change their perspective as well.

This interview shows the benefits of using such behavioral science-based approaches to bridge the political divide and have reasonable conversations that result in people going against their current values and changing their minds. What it takes is knowing why our minds are likely to lead us astray and addressing these internal biases using science-informed strategies to do so. In this case, the evidence — once corrected for political bias — points conclusively, in a way that both reasonable conservative and liberals can agree on, to Trump firing Comey due to concerns over the FBI’s investigation into Russian interference in the election.

Historically, the transition from one energy system to another, as from wood to coal or coal to oil, has proven an enormously complicated process, requiring decades to complete. In similar fashion, it will undoubtedly be many years before renewable forms of energy — wind, solar, tidal, geothermal, and others still in development — replace fossil fuels as the world’s leading energy providers. Nonetheless, 2015 can be viewed as the year in which the epochal transition from one set of fuels to another took off, with renewables making such significant strides that, for the first time in centuries, the beginning of the end of the Fossil Fuel Era has come into sight.

This shift will take place no matter how well or poorly the deal just achieved at the U.N. climate summit in Paris is carried out. Although a robust commitment by participating nations to curb future carbon emissions will certainly help speed the transition, the necessary preconditions — political will, investment capital, and technological momentum — are already in place to drive the renewable revolution forward. Lending a hand to this transformation will be a sharp and continuing reduction in the cost of renewable energy, making it increasingly competitive with fossil fuels. According to the Paris-based International Energy Agency (IEA), between now and 2040 global investments in renewable power capacity will total $7 trillion, accounting for 60% of all power plant investment.

Fossil fuels will not, of course, disappear during this period. Too much existing infrastructure —refineries, distribution networks, transportation systems, power plants, and the like — are dependent on oil, coal, and natural gas, which means, unfortunately, that these fuels will continue to play a prominent role for decades. But the primary thrust of new policies, new investment, and new technology will be in the advancement of renewables.

Breakthrough Initiatives

Two events on the periphery of the Paris climate summit were especially noteworthy in terms of the renewable revolution: the announcement of an International Solar Alliance by India and France, and the launching of the Breakthrough Energy Coalition by Bill Gates of Microsoft, Jeff Bezos of Amazon, and a host of other billionaires.

As described by Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, the International Solar Alliance is meant to mobilize private and public funds for the development and installation of affordable solar systems on a global scale, especially in developing countries. “We intend making joint efforts through innovative policies, projects, programs, capacity-building measures, and financial instruments to mobilize more than 1,000 billion U.S. dollars of investments that are needed by 2030 for the massive deployment of affordable solar energy,” Modi and French President François Hollande indicated in a joint statement on November 30th.

According to its sponsors, the aim of this program is to pool financing from both public and private sources in order to bring down the costs of solar systems even further and speed their utilization, especially in poor tropical countries. “The vast majority of humans are blessed with sunlight throughout the year,” Modi explained. “We want to bring solar energy into their lives.”

To get the alliance off the ground, the Indian government will commit some $30 billion for the establishment of the alliance’s headquarters in New Delhi. Modi has also pledged to increase solar power generation in India by 2,500% over the next seven years, expanding output from 4 to 100 gigawatts — thereby creating a vast new market for solar technology and devices. “This day is the sunrise of new hope, not just for clean energy, but for villages and homes still in darkness,” he said in Paris, adding that the solar alliance would create “unlimited economic opportunities” for green energy entrepreneurs.

The Breakthrough Energy Coalition, reportedly the brainchild of Bill Gates, will seek to channel private and public funds into the development of advanced green-energy technologies to speed the transition from fossil fuels to renewables. “Technology will help solve our energy issues,” the project’s website states. “Scientists, engineers, and entrepreneurs can invent and scale the innovative technologies that will limit the impact of climate change while providing affordable and reliable energy to everyone.”

As Gates imagines it, the new venture will seek to bundle funds from wealthy investors in order to move innovative energy breakthroughs from the laboratory — where they often languish — to full-scale development and production. “Experience indicates that even the most promising ideas face daunting commercialization challenges and a nearly impassable Valley of Death between promising concept and viable product,” the project notes. “This collective failure can be addressed, in part, by a dramatically scaled-up public research pipeline, linked to a different kind of private investor with a long-term commitment to new technologies who is willing to put truly patient flexible risk capital to work.”

Solar technology, among other green technologies, is a rapidly expanding field.

Joining Gates and Bezos in this venture are a host of super-rich investors, including Jack Ma, founder and executive chairman of Alibaba, the Chinese internet giant; Mark Zuckerberg, the founder and chairman of Facebook; George Soros, chairman of Soros Fund Management; and Ratan Tata, chairman emeritus of India’s giant Tata Sons conglomerate. While seeking to speed the progress of green technology, these investors also see a huge potential for future profits in this field and, as the venture claims, “will certainly be motivated partly by the possibility of making big returns over the long-term, but also by the criticality of an energy transition.”

While vast in their ambitions, these two schemes are not without their critics. Some environmentalists worry, for example, that Modi’s enthusiasm for the International Solar Alliance might actually be a public relations device aimed at deflecting criticism from his plans for increasing India’s reliance on coal to generate electricity. A report by Climate Action Tracker, an environmental watchdog group, noted, for instance, that “the absolute growth in [India’s] coal-powered electric generating capacity would be significantly larger than the absolute increase in renewable/non-fossil generation capacity” in that country between 2013 and 2030. “Ultimately, this would lead to a greater lock-in of carbon-intensive power infrastructure in India than appears necessary.”

The Gates initiative has come under criticism for favoring still-experimental “breakthrough” technologies over further improvements in here-and-now devices such as solar panels and wind turbines. For example, Joe Romm, a climate expert and former acting assistant secretary of energy, recently wrote at the website Climate Progress that “Gates has generally downplayed the amazing advances we’ve had in the keystone clean technologies,” such as wind and solar, while “investing in new nuclear power, geo-engineering technologies, and off-the-wall stuff.”

Despite such criticisms, the far-reaching implications and symbolic importance of these initiatives shouldn’t be dismissed. By funneling billions — and in the end undoubtedly trillions — of dollars into the development and deployment of green technologies, these politicians and plutocrats are ensuring that the shift from fossil fuels to renewables will gain further momentum with each passing year until it becomes unstoppable.

The Developing World Goes Green

In another sign of this epochal shift, ever more countries in the developing world — including some oil-producing ones — are embracing renewables as their preferred energy sources. According to the IEA, the newly industrialized countries, spearheaded by China and India, will spend $2.7 trillion on renewable-based power plants between 2015 and 2040, far more than the older industrialized nations.

This embrace of renewables by the developing world is especially significant given the way the major oil and gas companies — led by ExxonMobil and BP — have long argued that cheap fossil fuels provide these countries with the smoothest path to rapid economic development. Exxon CEO Rex Tillerson has even claimed that there is a “humanitarian imperative” to providing the developing world with cheap fossil fuels in order to save "millions and millions of lives."

In accordance with this self-serving rhetoric, Exxon, BP, Royal Dutch Shell, and other energy giants have been madly expanding their oil and gas distribution networks in Asia, Africa, and other developing areas.

Increasingly, however, the targets of this push are rejecting fossil fuels in favor of renewables. Morocco, for example, has pledged to obtain 42% of its electricity from renewables by 2020, far more than planned by the members of the European Union. Later this month, the country will commence operations at the Ouarzazate solar thermal plant, a mammoth facility capable of supplying electricity to one million homes by relying on an array of revolving parabolic mirrors covering some 6,000 acres. These will concentrate the power of sunlight and use it to produce steam for electricity-generating turbines.

Developing countries, like Rwanda, have adopted renewable-energy goals often surpassing those of industrialized countries.

Elsewhere in Africa, authorities in Rwanda have commissioned a vast solar array at Agahozo-Shalom Youth Village, about 40 miles east of Kigali, the capital. Consisting of 28,360 computer-controlled solar panels, the array can generate 8.5 megawatts of electricity, or about 6% of Rwanda’s capacity. Spread over an undulating hill, the panels are laid out in the shape of the African continent and are meant to be symbolic of solar energy’s importance to that energy-starved continent. “We have plenty of sun,” said Twaha Twagirimana, the plant supervisor. “Some are living in remote areas where there is no energy. Solar will be the way forward for African countries.”

Even more significant, a number of major oil-producing countries have begun championing renewables, too. On November 28th, for example, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid, vice president and ruler of Dubai, launched the Dubai Clean Energy Strategy 2050, which aims to make the emirate a global center of green energy. According to present plans, 25% of Dubai’s energy will come from clean energy sources by 2030 and 75% by 2050. As part of this drive, solar panels will be made mandatory for all rooftops by 2030. “Our goal is to become the city with the smallest carbon footprint in the world by 2050,” Sheikh Mohammed said when announcing the initiative.

As part of its green energy drive, Dubai is constructing the Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum Solar Park, intended to be the world’s largest solar facility. When completed, around 2030, the giant complex will produce some 5,000 megawatts of energy — about eight times as much as the Ouarzazate solar plant.

Long-Term Prospects

Evidence that an accelerating shift to renewables is already underway can also be found in recent studies of the global energy industry, most notably in the IEA’s just-released annual assessment of industry trends, World Energy Outlook 2015. “There are unmistakable signs that the much needed global energy transition is under way,” the report noted, with “60 cents of every dollar invested in new power plants to 2040 [to be] spent on renewable energy technologies.”

The growing importance of renewables, the IEA noted, is especially evident in the case of electricity generation. As more countries follow the growth patterns seen in China and South Korea, electricity is expected to provide an ever-increasing share of world energy requirements. Global electricity use, the report says, will grow by 46% between 2013 and 2040; all other forms of energy use, by only 24%. As a result, the share of total world energy provided by electricity will rise from 38% to 42%.

This shift is significant because renewables will provide a greater share of the energy used to generate electricity. Whereas they contributed only 12% of energy to power generation in 2013, the IEA reports, they are expected to supply 24% in 2040; meanwhile,the shares provided by coal and natural gas will grow by far smaller percentages, and that by oil will actually shrink. While coal and gas are still likely to dominate the power sector in 2040, the trend lines suggest that they will lose ever more ground to renewables as time goes on.

Contributing to the growing reliance on renewables, the IEA finds, is a continuing drop in the cost of deploying these technologies. Once considered pricey compared to fossil fuels, renewables are beginningto win out on cost alone. In 2014, the agency noted, “about three-quarters of global renewables-based [power] generation was competitive with electricity from other types of power plants without subsidies,” with large hydropower facilities contributing much of this share.

Certainly, renewables continue to benefit from subsidies of various sorts. In 2014, the IEA reports, governments provided some $112 billion to underwrite renewable power generation. While this may seem like a significant amount, it isonly about a quarter of the $490 billion in subsidies governments offered globally to the fossil fuel industry. If those outsized subsidies were eliminated and a price imposed on the consumption of carbon, as proposed in many of the schemes to be introduced in the wake of the Paris climate summit, renewables would become instantly competitive without subsidies.

Go Green Young Man and Young Woman

All this is not to say that the world will be a green-energy paradise in 2030 or 2040. Far from it. Barring the unexpected, fossil fuels will continue to rule in many areas, especially transportation, and the resulting carbon emissions will continue to warm the planet disastrously. By then, however, most new investment in the energy field will, at least, be devoted to renewables and in most places globally there will be rules and regulations aimed at facilitating their installation.

As a college professor, I often think about such developments in terms of my students. When they ask me for career advice these days, I urge them to gear their studies toward some field likely to prosper in exactly this future environment: renewable energy systems, green architecture and city planning, alternative transportation and industrial systems, sustainable development, and environmental law, among others. And more and more of my students are, in fact, choosing such paths.

More and more cities are increasing their reliance on renewable sources of energy.

Likewise, if I were a future venture capitalist, I would follow the lead of Gates, Bezos, and the other tycoons in the Breakthrough Energy Coalition by seeking out the most innovative work in the green energy field. It offers as close as you can get to a guarantee against failure. As the consumption of renewable energy explodes, the incentives for power and money-saving technical breakthroughs are only going to grow and the rate of discovery is sure to rise as well, undoubtedly offering enormous payback possibilities for those getting a piece of the action early.

Finally, if I were an aspiring politician, whether in this country or elsewhere, I would be spinning plans for my city, state, or nation to take the lead in the green energy revolution. Once the transition from fossil fuels to renewables gains more momentum, leadership in the development and deployment of green technologies will become a far more popular position, which means it will increase your electability. This proposition is already beginning to be tested. For example, the Labor Party candidate for mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, is now leading the way by building his campaign around a promise to set that city on course to be 100% powered by renewables by 2050.

You’re still going to hear a lot about fossil fuels — and for good reason — but make no mistake about it: the future belongs to renewables. Of course, Big Energy, the giant utilities, and the lobbyists and politicians in their pay, including just about the complete climate-change-denying Republican Party, will do everything in their (not insignificant) power to perpetuate the Fossil Fuel Era. In the process, they will cause immeasurable harm to the planet and to us all. They will win some battles. In the process, they will also be committing some of the great crimes of history. But the war they are fighting is a losing one. Inevitably, ever more people — especially the most dynamic and creative of the young — will be hitching their futures to the coming of a genuinely green civilization, ensuring its ultimate triumph.

Michael T. Klare, a TomDispatch regular, is a professor of peace and world security studies at Hampshire College and the author, most recently, of The Race for What’s Left. A documentary movie version of his book Blood and Oil is available from the Media Education Foundation. Follow him on Twitter at @mklare1.

Many scientific studies have been so embraced by the media, they’ve become facts we often regard with, “Well, duh.” Consider bilingualism: It’s the full-proof edge! Hire a Spanish-speaking nanny! Pop in Rosetta Stone and double your salary!

Despite it being an invaluable skill, it’d be wise to hold off on the “duh.” A new metastudy suggests that there’s a publication bias to what scientific journals choose to headline—ones that eventually make their way through the mainstream media and into the public’s bank of “common sense” facts. That’s because there’s more meat to a headline that claims there’s a link between two things (*blank* causes cancer, for example) than a study that finds the same research inconclusive or that denies the connection entirely.

One research team from Edinburgh University looked at 104 papers on bilingualism that were presented at academic conferences (typical venues for researchers to receive edits before attempting to get published in peer-reviewed journals). Despite there being an even split between research that either supported or questioned the advantages to bilingualism, only 36 percent of papers that challenged the popular notion got published, compared to 63 percent that supported it.

But publications are not the only ones to blame; another study looked at how often researchers reported their null results. One Stanford team analyzed projects run through the National Science Foundation’s Timeshare Experiments in the Social Sciences (TESS), which keeps records of all experiments it’s conducted. The team could then figure out what has yielded positive or negative results and if those findings have been published, written but never published, or never written at all. While they found that publication bias is, indeed, real, they found that researchers aren’t submitting their null results, either. Of the 47 negative outcomes in the TESS data, only 38 percent were even written. Of the 170 positive results, roughly 93 percent were reported.

Neil Malhotra, co-author of a new study on publication bias and a professor at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business, said it’s important for researchers to at least write down their null results so that other scientists can be aware of them. But it’ll take institutional changes, he said, such as new journals dedicated to negative findings so scientists feel encouraged to report these results.

Although inconclusive studies lack drama, they provide science with context, Malhotra said. The Edinburgh research team summed it up in their press release: “All data, not just selected data that supports a particular theory, should be shared, and this is especially true when it comes to data regarding issues that have enormous societal relevance and implications, such as bilingualism.”

The human head weighs about 12 pounds … unless you add a Smartphone to that equation. The more the neck bends downward, the more weight is added to the cervical spine: at a 15-degree angle, the head weighs 27 pounds; at 30 degrees, 40 pounds; at 45 degrees, 49 pounds; at 60 degrees, 60 pounds (the equivalent to carrying an 8-year-old around your neck). The result: “text-neck.”

On average, Smartphone users (58 percent of American adults) look down at their phones two to four hours a day—about 700 to 1,400 hours a year of added spinal stress. High schoolers, on the other hand, could spend up to an additional 5,000 hours hunched over in this position.

Physical therapists say that as the tissue stretches for long periods of time, it gets sore and inflamed, also causing muscle strain, pinched nerves, herniated disks and, over time, can potentially remove the neck’s natural curve. Poor posture can also contribute to headaches and neurological issues, depression and heart disease, and can reduce the lung capacity by as much as 30 percent.

One expert gave TODAYsome tips to avoid this pain, such as using your eyes to look down at your phone instead of bending your neck. Be sure to move your head from left to right several times, as well, or try standing in a doorway with both arms extended while pushing your chest forward to strengthen the muscles activated during good posture.

A Georgia appellate court recently reached a decision that holds parents liable for their kids’ online activity—an unprecedented legal ruling, lawyers said. The parents of a 7th grader were deemed “negligent” after failing to get their son to delete a defamatory Facebook profile of a female classmate in 2011.

According to court documents, the boy and a friend of his created a fake Facebook account posing as the girl, which included altered photos of her, racist and promiscuous comments and photos, and claims that she was on medication and doing illegal drugs. They sent friend-requests to her classmates, teachers and family members, reaching 70 Facebook friends in two days.

When the girl and her parents discovered this profile, they complained to the school principal, who gave the boy two days of in-school suspension and informed his parents, who grounded him for a week. The profile, however, remained active for another 11 months until the girl’s parents urged Facebook to deactivate it. Her lawyer said that the school protected the boy’s confidentiality, preventing her parents from confronting his.

The courts held that the key question regarding negligence lies in the parent’s ability to anticipate harm as a result of the unsupervised activity.

“Given that the false and offensive statements remained on display, and continued to reach readers, for an additional 11 months, we conclude that a jury could find that the [parents’] negligence proximately caused some part of the injury [the girl] sustained from [the boy’s] actions (and inactions),” wrote Judge John J. Ellington in the opinion, handed down Oct. 10. Another part of the lawsuit sought to hold the parents responsible for allowing the page to be posted in the first place, which the appeals court dismissed.

Atlanta litigator Edgar S. Mangiafico, Jr., who represented the boy, said he will appeal the ruling to the Georgia Supreme Court, noting that he couldn’t find a previous case where the parents were held responsible for failing to supervise their kid’s computer use regarding cyberbullying.

Atlanta attorney Natalie Woodward, who represented the girl, agreed that this was a novel outcome, saying that the ruling shows that in certain circumstances, parental knowledge triggers liability.